Reasonの January 2026 の目次

WARSAW, POLAND, IS a living museum of economic systems. It’s a city where concrete reliefs of stoic factory workers decorate a building that now houses a Kentucky Fried Chicken, where a Soviet-era apartment block stands beside a glass tower filled with coworking spaces. Not even 35 years after escaping Soviet-style central planning, Poland has become a capitalist success story—the world’s 20th-largest economy and among the most prosperous of the former Eastern Bloc nations. The country’s transformation isn’t just visible in gross domestic product figures; it’s on every street corner and in every bite. At lunchtime, you can step into a bar mleczny, where beet soup and pierogi still cost a few zloty. A few blocks away, in a converted power plant, bar-tenders pour small-batch IPAs. Those two scenes tell the…

CNN JOURNALIST JAKE Tapper’s latest book, Race Against Terror: Chasing an Al Qaeda Killer at the Dawn of the Forever War, tells the little-known story of an Al Qaeda operative who surrendered to Italian authorities in 2011 and claimed to have carried out attacks that killed American soldiers. With no evidence to prove the murders happened, two assistant U.S. prosecutors traveled around the world to investigate his claims and build a case. The book shows how early counter-terrorism decisions shaped the broader global war on terror. Tapper is a longtime reporter and, since 2013, the host of The Lead with Jake Tapper; his other books range from political nonfiction to historical thrillers. In October, he spoke with Reason’s Nick Gillespie about Race Against Terror and why the story it tells…

IF YOU WERE looking for a human avatar of America’s unipolar moment, you couldn’t do better than Michael McFaul. Picture a youthful, energetic McFaul with a newly minted Ph.D. bounding into the suddenly post-Soviet space of the early 1990s, full of bright ideas about democracy and faith in the end of history. As McFaul himself puts it, 1991 “was a glorious moment to be a democratic, liberal, capitalist, multilateralist, and American…. I was treated like a rockstar.” History, however, was undeterred. From his perch in the Democratic Party’s foreign policy elite, McFaul had a front-row seat for the twists and turns of U.S. foreign policy. As an adviser on national security to President Barack Obama and later as Obama’s ambassador to Russia, he watched the U.S.-Russia relationship worsen; he negotiated…

MULTIPLE NEWS OUTLETS reported in September 2025 that the Justice Department was weighing a ban on gun possession by transgender people, on the theory that they are “mentally ill” and therefore “unstable.” That constitutionally dubious proposal provoked objections from gun rights groups that typically align with the Trump administration, including the National Rifle Association (NRA). The immediate impetus for the proposal, which harks back to a dark history of attempts to disarm disfavored groups such as Native Americans and black people, was the August 27 shooting that killed two children and injured 21 other people at the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. Police identified the perpetrator, who killed herself after attacking the worshipers, as a 23-year-old transgender woman. CNN reported that “Justice Department leadership is seriously considering whether it can…

AS THE DEPARTMENT of Government Efficiency (DOGE) transitioned from internet meme to real-life government reform effort, the agency claimed it would achieve many far-reaching, seemingly improbable goals. It was going to slash $2 trillion in federal spending, eliminate burdensome and unconstitutional regulations, upgrade the federal government’s “tech stack,” evict the woke deep state, and, time permitting, balance the budget. When it launched, both DOGE supporters and critics seemed to believe the agency was striving for the wholesale dismantling of the federal government. As the dust settles one year later, we can get a more accurate sense of how much DOGE has done to shrink and streamline the federal government. Its cost-cutting efforts have been unsuccessful, but it did accomplish quite a bit toward shrinking the federal government’s workforce. The Trump…

DOGE’S IMPACT ON federal spending is murkier, largely due to its inability to accurately and transparently account for its own claimed savings. The agency’s website says that it has saved taxpayers $214 billion by canceling contracts, grants, and leases. Unfortunately, DOGE’s “wall of receipts” tallying these savings is riddled with errors and accounting gimmicks. For instance, the agency will count as a savings the entire value of a contract it canceled, even if much of the obligated money has already been spent. Another DOGE savings gimmick is to lower the maximum amount the government could potentially spend on a contract, even though those funds had not been spent and likely never would have been spent. This practice, it’s been pointed out, is comparable to taking out a credit card with…

HOW WOULD WILLIAM F. Buckley Jr., born 100 years ago in November, feel about the Trumpian takeover of the American conservative movement? Because Buckley lacked a solidly reasoned ideology, that question turns out to be almost impossible to answer with assurance. The National Review founder identified at times as both a libertarian and an individualist, helping to found a group then called the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (which now goes by the more ideologically null Intercollegiate Studies Institute) and subtitling one of his essay collections Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist. He also defended the far-fromlibertarian dictators Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet. He was a tough-on-crime proponent of the death penalty but a supporter of the legalization of drugs and gambling. He was a vehement anti-communist willing to sacrifice freedom at…

IN THE NAME of the Rose, Umberto Eco describes a labyrinthine monastic library large enough to lose oneself in. The novelist didn’t mention how many books filled its rooms, but John O. Ward of the University of Sydney worked out some straightforward calculations based on Eco’s description of the layout and space. The collection, he concluded, would amount to 85,000 volumes. The library was the “greatest in Christendom,” Eco wrote. But actually, it was far, far bigger. It’s not uncommon for a modern American public library to contain so many volumes, but no medieval library possessed that number—nowhere close. Many early monastic libraries could fit their entire collections (probably just a couple of dozen codices) in a niche in the wall or in a single wooden box. As the centuries…

5 YEARS AGO January 2021 “As the market matures and companies begin to merge, antitrust authorities might decide to get involved. They shouldn’t. Every restaurant has a choice between hiring its own delivery people or outsourcing to a delivery app. Businesses will choose whichever option has greater upsides for them. Moreover, entering and exiting an app service is easy for both restaurants and drivers. If the app company proves more expensive than in-house employees, no one will use the app. This built-in price competition can never go away and makes it very difficult to argue that any sharing economy–style service has a monopoly.” RYAN YOUNG “Sometimes Bigger Is Better” 15 YEARS AGO January 2011 “Police across the country are using decades-old wiretapping statutes that did not anticipate iPhones or Droids, combined with…

A substitute van driver for Pennsylvania’s West Shore School District got lost multiple times while taking kids home because he put the right address but the wrong city into his GPS, and heavy highway traffic then forced him to detour onto back roads. The driver called his supervisor twice to say he was lost, and district staff tried to give him directions over the phone, but after 5 p.m., they finally told him to pull over at a local business; families were then told to go pick up their kids. Steven Keenan resigned after being suspended as director of facilities services for Akron Public Schools. According to a school board investigation, Keenan traded in 11 of the school district’s lawn mowers to a vendor without authorization, then bought seven of…

AFTER JIMMY KIMMEL delivered a misinformed monologue about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr pressured broadcast channels to take the comedian off the air. Carr faced immediate pushback: Republican Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ted Cruz of Texas, and Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania all chastised Carr for trying to use his position to steer private companies’ editorial decisions—a serious breach of free speech principles. Carr is not without his defenders, however. Nathan Leamer, tech policy writer and onetime adviser to former FCC Chair Ajit Pai, asserts that Carr’s actions fall squarely within his duty to promote the “public interest” on television, as defined by the Communications Act of 1934. He also assails libertarians in particular for not caring about how the FCC works, and…

BURDENSOME FOOD LABELING mandates were once the province of Democrats, who pushed for calorie count requirements on restaurant menus and insisted packaged food must feature warnings about genetically modified ingredients and trans fats. Now it’s Republicans leading the charge—with equally foolish results. In Louisiana, restaurants will have to disclose when they feature products cooked with seed oils. The requirement—included in Senate Bill 14, authored by state Sen. Patrick McMath (R–Covington) and signed into law by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry in June—is set to take effect in 2028. Seed oils have become a major target of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, whose figurehead is Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “Seed oils are one of the driving causes of the obesity epidemic,” according to Kennedy, who…

ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS IN Alejandro Flores-Muñoz’s blood. Back in his birthplace of Guadalajara, Mexico, his mother and other relatives sold whatever they could—hair products, food products—to make ends meet. After Flores-Muñoz’s mom brought him to the U.S. as a child, she got a nine-to-five job but kept her entrepreneurial streak alive. “From me just having to watch her figure out how to make a large batch of cheesecakes and flanes” to observing her develop “her selling points” and participate in pop-up events, Flores-Muñoz says, “that entrepreneurship spirit was instilled in me.” He was inspired to become an entrepreneur himself in 2012 after receiving Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a status established by President Barack Obama’s administration that delays deportation for people who were brought to the U.S. without documentation as…

OF ALL THE popular storytelling artists striving to emulate Ayn Rand, the most significant was Steve Ditko. Ditko, a comic book artist, is most famous for co-creating Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. Rand, in addition to writing novels that still sell hugely seven decades down the line, developed a philosophy she called Objectivism, the politics of which were highly libertarian and highly controversial. Ditko’s commitment to Rand’s ideas led him down a curious and troubled path, and made him resemble a real-life Rand character. From developing enduring legends for Marvel Comics in the 1960s to Kickstartering in the 2010s with fewer than 150 sponsors his uniquely and often bizarrely abstract stories, Ditko emulated aspects of both of Rand’s most prominent fictional protagonists. Like Howard Roark, the individualist architect of The Fountainhead,…

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